How Romania’s Fascist and Communist Pasts Haunt Its Politics

It appeared to be an easy decision: a suggestion to change the name of a main street in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, that commemorated a World War II fascist official convicted of war crimes.

Diana Mardarovici, a city councilor in Bucharest, had put forward the idea to change the street’s name, assuming there would be no opposition at City Hall to eliminating a tribute to an individual who had participated in the seizure of money, jewelry, and property from Jews and other crimes on behalf of Romania’s Nazi-collaborating government.https://wordpress.com/

“I believed this would be a simple task, a walk in the park,” Ms. Mardarovici reflected. “I was certain we all understood that Nazis are reprehensible.” However, her proposal from the previous year never reached a council vote.

“My fellow council members are not Nazis. They do not harbor hatred towards Jews,” she stated. “But they believe that acknowledging the past misdeeds of individuals they consider heroes undermines their national identity.”

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This incident is one of the several unsuccessful attempts in recent years to remove street names, statues, and other honors given to Romanian fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, some of whom are the country’s most renowned writers and intellectuals, lauded for their contributions to Romanian culture and their resistance to communism.

Mircea Vulcanescu, the individual Ms. Mardarovici wished to remove from the street’s name, was a philosopher, sociologist, and economist. Despite being convicted of war crimes post-World War II, he is still widely celebrated as a leading figure in Romanian culture.

While some of the honored individuals have been removed, the continued veneration of others, Ms. Mardarovici noted, helps explain how an ultranationalist like Calin Georgescu was able to garner significant support in his bid for the Romanian presidency. He was poised to win a runoff vote last Sunday—until the constitutional court, citing various irregularities, halted the process.

A new election date has yet to be determined by the new government following the parliamentary elections on December 1. The relatively unknown independent candidate, Mr. Georgescu, won the first round on November 24 by exploiting deep-seated resentment against foreigners, domestic elites, minorities, and those perceived as besmirching Romania’s history.

The unexpected cancellation of the second round disrupted Mr. Georgescu’s rising campaign but left the underlying forces that drove it unaddressed.

Ms. Mardarovici expressed “relief” that the court had disrupted Mr. Georgescu’s presidential campaign, which blended left-wing criticisms of foreign corporate exploitation with praise for past Romanian fascists.

However, she added: “This will definitely not resolve our deeper issues.”

Nor will the announcement on Wednesday by mainstream pro-European parties that they intend to form a new coalition government, and in an effort to prevent Mr. Georgescu’s return, support a single presidential candidate when the halted election is resumed.

“We are experiencing a national identity crisis,” Ms. Mardarovici stated.

Romania, a land once under the rule of the Roman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, only became a fully independent state in 1877 and has since struggled with what Liviu Rotman, a history professor at the National School for Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, described as a “siege complex.”

Encircled by Slavic peoples from Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine, Romanians have often felt besieged. Nationalists have long argued that Romanians settled in the region before Slavs or Hungarians, the country’s largest minority, tracing their origins back over two millennia. This has led many Romanians to overlook the distasteful aspects or crimes of those who contributed to a distinct national culture.

After the collapse of communism in 1989, the punishment inflicted on Mr. Vulcanescu and other wartime criminals by the communist regime bestowed upon them an “aura of heroism,” said Alexandru Florian, head of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania.

Street names that once celebrated communists were changed to honor individuals like Mr. Vulcanescu as Romania sought to assert its national identity by looking to the past.

Mr. Vulcanescu, who died in a communist-era prison in 1952, is now remembered not as a Holocaust perpetrator but as a prominent intellectual from the 1930s, a time when many leading Romanian thinkers embraced extreme nationalism intertwined with religious faith. They viewed themselves as defending their nation against communism and hostile foreign forces collaborating with domestic minorities.

“Romanian intellectuals were all nationalists, and the entire culture became saturated with their ideas,” Professor Rotman said.

“Cultivated amnesia,” he said, has largely erased memories of where those ideas led during World War II, when Romania allied with Hitler’s Germany. A 2004 report by a commission chaired by the Romanian-born Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel estimated that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews died in Romania and areas under its control during the war.

That amnesia has left many people easily “seduced” by Mr. Georgescu, Professor Rotman said.

Unlike other prominent and often vocal nationalists in Romania, Mr. Georgescu, a multilingual former agronomist, presented himself as a serious advocate for ordinary people rooted in the land and the values of the Orthodox Church.

“Georgescu is not a noisy, vulgar politician, but can actually persuade people,” said Oliver Jens Schmitt, a history professor at the University of Vienna. Mr. Schmitt is also the author of a biography of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of Romania’s antisemitic Legionary Movement in the 1930s and its paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard.

Mr. Georgescu, Mr. Schmitt said, “is an indicator of the extent to which Legionary propaganda has gradually infiltrated the Romanian mainstream.”

Mr. Georgescu, speaking recently on Romanian TV, dismissed reports of his support for the Legionary cause as “fake.”

However, past statements by Mr. Georgescu unearthed by Romanian media outlets after his surprising first-round victory show the candidate praising the Legionary Movement and imitating speeches of Ion Antonescu, Romania’s fascist leader during World War II.

Public celebration of the Legionary movement is prohibited. A series of laws and decrees since the early 2000s have made it illegal to honor convicted war criminals or promote hatred against minorities. Teaching about the Holocaust has been mandatory in state schools since last year.

But that did not prevent several dozen extreme nationalists from gathering on November 30 in a forest outside Bucharest to commemorate the anniversary of the 1938 death of the movement’s founder, Mr. Codreanu.

One of those attending, a 20-year-old university student who gave only his first name, Alexandru, said he had broken up with his girlfriend since she had participated in an antifascist protest. “Why is it bad to be called a Nazi?” he wondered. Prosecutors last week opened a criminal investigation into the forest commemoration.

Mr. Georgescu, the ultranationalist running for president, has stayed clear of such events. But he has expressed admiration for Mr. Codreanu, describing in 2020 his Legionary movement as “the strongest essence and expression of the health and free will of the Romanian people.”

Many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where fascist terror before and during World War II gave way to communist tyranny after 1945, have defended war criminals as patriots because they opposed communism.

Ukraine honors Stepan Bandera, a nationalist responsible for the slaughter of Jews and Poles. Latvia has a remembrance day for members of the Latvia Legion, an arm of the Nazi German Waffen-SS. Many Hungarians revere their own wartime leader, Adm. Miklos Horthy, an ally of Hitler.

In Romania, while postwar communist leaders, particularly Nicolae Ceausescu, paid lip service to the fight against fascism, they also embraced an ethnic nationalism with often fascist overtones.

Among other things, Mr. Ceausescu persecuted Hungarians in pursuit of “Romanization” and quietly supported the rehabilitation of the wartime fascist leader, Antonescu, who was executed in 1946.

Andrei Ursu, the author of books about Mr. Ceausescu’s security service, said Romania’s communist police and intelligence agencies were filled with hard-line nationalists. After the collapse of communism in a bloody revolution in 1989, he said, they promoted the political careers of rabid anti-Semites and xenophobes. That helped pave the way for Mr. Georgescu’s candidacy for president, he said.

Also complicating historical reckoning in Romania is the fact that extreme nationalism entered the intellectual mainstream.

Several of the most celebrated writers from what is viewed as a golden age of Romanian literature between the last century’s two great wars, including Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, were once enthusiastic fascists.

“You can’t cancel them. They are too important. If we cancel all the fascists, we will be left with Nadia Comaneci,” the gymnast, “and Dracula,” said Liviu Ornea, a Jewish writer and mathematics professor at the University of Bucharest.

In October, Mr. Florian, the director of the Holocaust institute, felt encouraged when a court ordered Buch